Cristóbal Balenciaga and Demna Gvasalia Have More in Common Than You Think

It’s really difficult to imagine two fashion designers more different than the monastic and reclusive Cristóbal Balenciaga and the Georgian-born, streetwise Demna Gvasalia, the new creative director of the Parisian house, founded in 1937. The designers are as different in temperament as they are in aesthetic. Balenciaga never took a bow and is known to have given only one full interview ever. Gvasalia, once the anonymous head of the Vetements collective, has revealed himself and engaged the press. The Spaniard catered to the upper crust; the Georgian embraces youthful subcultures and the underground. Yet, as we discovered, there are some interesting and unexpected points of convergence between the two men.

Both chose Paris as their home.
Cristóbal Balenciaga, the son of a fisherman and a seamstress, was born in 1895 in Getaria, a coastal village in the Basque region of Spain. When the Civil War broke out, the designer closed his shops and fled to Paris, establishing his couture salon on Avenue George V in 1937.

A child of the ’80s, Demna Gvasalia was born in Soviet Georgia and moved to Germany in 2000. He studied economics there before enrolling at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. After graduation, he designed menswear for Walter Van Beirendonck and launched his own line at Tokyo Fashion Week in 2007. Two years later he moved to Paris to work for Maison Martin Margiela, then Louis Vuitton.

Both preferred unconventional mannequins.
Chez Balenciaga, the house models were called the “monsters.” They were often, wrote Rosamond Bernier in her memoirs, “really plain.” Some, it’s been said, were selected for their resemblance to a client; none were warm and fuzzy. “The master,” explains Bernier, “had instructed them to never smile, never make eye contact, just to look haughtily over the heads of clients.” Balenciaga’s favorite was a woman named Colette, who, a former vendeuse told biographer Mary Blume, “had great authority and chic. She walked in like a grenadier, as if she wanted to kill everyone. The way she would halt before clients. One was afraid!”

As for Gvasalia, at Vetements, he told Purple, “We use girls and guys who are our friends, who aren’t models, who don’t really care about fashion.” Some of them, WWD reports, “are escorts, [who] don’t have permanent addresses, and smoke joints during fittings.”

Both cultivated an air of mystery.
“Nobody knew how tall he was, if he was slim or fat—several French journalists thought he wasn’t one person, but that he was a team of designers. And this is simply because he did not appear,” said Blume in an interview with NPR. In 1971 The Times’s Prudence Glyn explained his reticence: “It is caused, he told me passionately, by the absolute impossibility he finds of explaining his métier to anyone.”

When Vetements debuted in 2014, no one knew who was behind it, which was by design. “When we started,” Gvasalia has explained, “we didn’t want anyone’s face on the brand.” This was partly because the members of the creative collective were working day jobs at other labels at the time. But it also seemed to reference the famed anonymity of Margiela, where Gvasalia worked for years. But, take note, he’s over his past life now. “Personally, I just can’t deal with that association anymore,” the designer told Purple.

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Draping: by Vetements (Spring 2016) and Balenciaga

Photos: Courtesy of @brownsfashion; Everett Collection

Both designed for a niche audience.
Although the monastic and rarified world of Balenciaga is polar to that of Gvasalia, who presented his Fall 2015 show at a gay club in Paris called Le Dépot, both designers target a very specific client. For Gvasalia they are like-minded peers: “We speak in the voice not of our generation, but of a small public.”

Balenciaga also catered to a small group of women—his clientele were the privileged and the elite. “Curious women are not welcome here,” was the gospel a vendeuse preached to a client who dared ask if a friend could view the collection. The clients who were admitted into the “club” seemed to feel as strongly about Balenciaga as Kanye West does about Gvasalia: The rapper recently tweeted, “I’m going to steal Demna from Balenciaga.” When the Spaniard shuttered his house in 1968, his top client, the celebrated Mona von Bismarck, took to her bed for days, eliciting sympathy from Diana Vreeland (who in 1973 would curate “The World of Balenciaga” at the Costume Institute). “I mean, it was the end of a certain part of her life!” said Vreeland.

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Balenciaga, 1950; Vetements Spring 2015

Photos: Eric, Vogue, June 1, 1950; Courtesy of Vetements

Both disrupted the system.
“Seismic” is how Vogue.com’s Chief Critic Sarah Mower has described the shake-up Gvasalia and his brother Guram have caused in the current fashion system. Vetements will present two in-season collections a year, combine men’s and womenswear, and show off-schedule, a move that echoes the one that Helmut Lang made many years ago. “Their aim,” Mower writes, “is a sweeping plan to cut out the necessity for pre-collections, beat the copyists, stop overproduction, and persuade others to come with them.”

When Balenciaga decided to buck the system, he was in good company. In July 1957 he resigned from the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, along with his friends Coco Chanel and Hubert de Givenchy. The latter would stand with Balenciaga when he decided not to show his collection to the press for almost a month after it was presented to manufacturers, clients, and buyers, prompting the following 1957 New York Times headline: “Muddle in Paris Over Dates at Spring Shows.” Sound familiar? While neither designer explained their decision, foiling copyists seemed to have motivated their decision.